A Possible Giant Squid

And here we must leave Captain Clubin, naked but for his money belt, attached unwillingly by the foot to something at the bottom of the sea. What can it be? Why do I not tell you what it is?

I can tell you why. It is because Victor Hugo himself does not say. At least not yet.

The next one hundred pages are about Gilliat, a reclusive Guernsey fisherman, who sets out to salvage the engines of the Durande in the hope of winning the hand of Deruchette, the beautiful daughter of Messe Lethierry, the now-ruined owner of the wreck.

It may even be more than one hundred pages. That is all I have read so far. Certainly the next eight pages are about a storm. The last ten pages were about the wind. Before that we watched Gilliat painstakingly building a forge with his bare hands, making all sorts of useful nails and ropes and pulleys and goodness knows what else, camping on the larger of the two Douvres, eating shellfish and drinking rainwater, dismantling the wreck and salvaging the engines by lowering them onto the deck of his paunch. His paunch? Well that is what Hugo calls Gilliat's boat. I'm sure it must be a proper name for a boat of some sort.

However, I think I know what it was that grabbed Captain Clubin by the foot. A giant squid!

I know this because I have googled Victor Hugo and discovered that The Toilers of the Sea was a huge popular success in 1866, and that Parisians were fascinated by the giant squid depicted in the story, with its nightmarish anatomy and alarming single orifice. At that time little was known about the denizens of the deep. So fascinated were they that squid dishes, squid hats and squid parties became all the rage in Paris.

Of course if it turns out not to be a giant squid, I promise to let you know.